VMware’s Cloud Unit Seeks to Strengthen Position in Cloud Market

VMware last week announced its public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service which, the company says, is the next step in its development and planning to support customers.

The vCloud Hybrid Service is set to be released in Q2 this year, and customers will be able to access and make use of the public cloud advantages, without having to update their existing applications when using a common management, orchestration, networking and security model.

A new business unit has also been developed, and this is called Hybrid Cloud Services; former President at Savvis and current senior vice president and general manager at VMware, Bill Fathers, leads it.

VMware will assist customers in moving their private cloud workloads to the public cloud, whilst simultaneously maintaining governance and management. DynamicOps and vCenter Operations are examples of tools which VMware sees as able to monitor workloads in some public cloud environments, and this is what sets it apart from Amazon EC2.

EMC, a VMware parent company, has pledged engineers to the project of integrating the vCloud Hybrid Service with EMC’s Avamar backup and recovery products, which will be finished at the end of the year. This service will be sold through VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service.

James Staten, a Forrester analyst, wrote that partners of VMware do not necessarily see “more revenue at the end of the public cloud rainbow” and do not possess the skills or trust level to adequately support their customers in the transition from virtualized infrastructure to cloud computing. Staten said: “This requires consulting skills and real cloud experience and most VMware partners don't have either.”

VMware has, until now, allowed its partners to deliver these services, but given that Amazon is consistently lowering prices and including new features, the company has decided to change its strategy and enter the public cloud space itself.

Vice president of research at Gartner, Chris Wolf, said that the vCloud Hybrid Services is “a move that VMware had to make,” especially as it was unable to stay ahead in the cloud market.

Enterprise-grade features will need to be built in, as will unique developer tools; this will aid in creating longstanding management solutions in hybrid cloud environments, which will of course appeal to customers.

Wolf stated: “This is an opportunity where VMware can leverage its management assets both inside the data center and in the public cloud to allow customers to redeploy workloads and not have to worry about the infrastructure or management stack.”

Staten added that the “hybrid” cloud label signifies that VMware is trying to show its enterprise customers the key points of the role vCloud Director will play in merging everything together. He said: “[VMware] has long claimed that vCloud Director, which instantiates an IaaS environment, empowers [infrastructure and operations] professionals to manage workloads in exactly the same way, with the same vCenter tools whether deployed on-premise or in the cloud.”

The CEO at VMware, Pat Gelsinger, controversially encouraged partners to dissuade their customers from opting for Amazon services. Gelsinger said: “We want to extend our franchise from the private cloud into the public cloud and uniquely enable our customers with the benefits of both. Own the corporate workload now and forever.”

It is clear now that VMware is addressing its inability to keep up in the cloud market, but it remains to be seen how effective the Hybrid Cloud unit will be in aiding the company’s efforts. (CY) Link